Chicago Journal ::

Hospitals shifts leadership
As former Hospitals President and CEO Mike Riordan stepped down July 1, University and Hospitals trustees restructured the institution’s leadership. James Madara, dean of the Biological Sciences Division (BSD) and VP for medical affairs, is now also CEO of the U of C Medical Center, overseeing the Hospitals, the Pritzker School of Medicine, and BSD clinical programs. When a new Hospitals president is named—Kenneth Kates, executive vice president and chief operating officer, is serving in the interim—he or she will report to Madara. Meanwhile Valerie Jarrett, a U of C trustee since 2001 and vice chair of the Hospitals board since 2002, has been named chair of the U of C Medical Center Board and also chair of its executive committee.

Yerkes sale nears completion
The University has reached an agreement to sell Yerkes Observatory to New York–based Mirbeau Company, which plans to develop 45 acres of land near the 109-year-old structure, building homes and a spa. If approved by the village of Williams Bay, Wisconsin, the agreement would preserve the observatory and 30 surrounding acres. Mirbeau would pay $400,000 a year to support the observatory as an education and outreach institution, and $8 million to the University, supporting astronomical research. Chicago would continue to manage Yerkes for at least five years and provide $300,000 annually for maintenance during that time.

Maroons win science fellowships
This year eight College students and recent graduates were among 1,000 winners of the National Science Foundation’s graduate research fellowships, funding research-based master’s or doctoral degrees in math and science. They are Karen M. Alofs, AB'02, ecology; third-year Stephen Brusatte, geophysical sciences; Nathaniel Hendren, SB’05, economics; Michal Ran, AB’05, cultural anthropology; Christine Romano, SB’05, chemistry; David Strubbe, SB’05, physics; Trinh Tran, AB’01, sociology; and Andrew Fitzpatrick, AB’04, physics.

Book collections garner prizes
Two College students won the 2006 T. Kimball Brooker (AM’89, PhD’96) Prize for book collecting. Quinn Anya Carey, AB’06, who has amassed books about the former Soviet Union and the Russian language, took home $1,000. Second-year Sabahat Adil, whose collection reflects her life travels beginning with her India roots, won $500. In its 17th year, the prize awards “the care and judgment by which the student has shaped the collection” rather than monetary value or number of books.

Top in prof payment
Chicago faculty earn the nation’s highest average university salary, adjusted for cost-of-living expenses, according to the April 28 Chronicle of Higher Education. In 2005–06 full professors at Chicago earned on average $155,100. In real dollar terms that figure came in fourth behind Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford, respectively. Yet Chicago’s adjusted average salary, determined by the Council for Community and Economic Research, was $122,194, ahead of Princeton, Harvard, and MIT. Stanford’s adjusted salary ranked seventh.

Klassy VP heads east
Stephen Klass, vice president and dean of students in the University, leaves Chicago in August to become vice president for operations at Wil-liams College. Klass, who came from the University of Rochester in 1995, cochaired the Provost’s Initiative for Minority Issues and helped plan the College dorm slated to open in 2008 at 61st Street and Ellis Avenue.

Genomicist to lead new institute
Kevin P. White has left the Yale School of Medicine to dir-ect Chicago’s new Institute for Genomic and Systems Biology. Also named a professor in human genetics and ecology & evolution, White is a pioneer in combining experimental and computational techniques to understand the factors that control gene expression during development and evolution.

Stem-cell funding
Dorothy Sipkins, assistant professor of medicine, will receive $473,000 of a $10 million State of Illinois grant for stem-cell research. One of ten researchers statewide given funds from the new Illinois Regenerative Medicine Institute, Sipkins hopes to decipher the molecular signals that blood-producing cells use in survival and regeneration.

Euro-prize for GSB prof
Graduate School of Business associate professor of finance Monika Piazzesi has won the 2005 Bernacer Prize. Given to the best European economist under age 40 focusing on finance or macroeconomics, the prize recognizes her work for helping to improve “our understanding of the connection between asset prices—including bonds, equities and real estate—and the institutional features of monetary policy and business cycles.” Piazzesi, a German citizen, accepted the prize—and 25,000 euros-—in Madrid May 31.

Open doors remain open
In May the U.S. Commerce Depart-ment withdrew national-security proposals to limit foreign students’ use of sensitive machinery in advanced scientific and engineering projects (see “Q&A: Research Post-9/11,” April/05). Provosts at Chicago and eight other research universities—Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, MIT, Penn, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale—had protested that such restrictions would discourage enrollment, disrupt classroom teaching, and limit academic freedom.

Law School losses
Five Law School faculty will leave Chicago this coming academic year: Albert Alschuler (to Northwestern), Philip Hamburger (to Columbia), Tracey Meares, JD’91 (to Yale), Alan Sykes (to Stanford), and Adrian Vermeule (to Harvard). “It is an unusually large number of departures,” law professor David Strauss, who chairs the faculty-appointments committee, told the Maroon, “but I don’t foresee a dramatic change in our approach to hiring; these things even out in the long run.”

GSB prof heads to London
Austan Goolsbee, the Robert P. Gwinn professor of economics at the GSB, won a Fulbright scholarship for 2006–07. Spending the year at the London School of Economics and London’s Institute for Fiscal Studies, Goolsbee will research Internet taxation in the United States and Eurpoean Union.

Shubin named Field provost
Neil Shubin, professor and chair of organismal & evolutionary biology, has been appointed provost of the city’s Field Museum and associate dean of his U of C department. In his new, dual roles, Shubin, who earned media coverage this spring for his research on a “missing-link” fossil (see “Coursework,” page 10), will “deepen the connections between the University and the museum,” said U of C biological sciences dean James Madara.

Case dismissed
In May Clyde Kennard, a black U of C student who attended the College for three years in the 1950s, was exonerated posthumously by a Mississippi court after being accused in 1960 of stealing chicken feed. After Kennard repeated-ly tried to enroll in then-all-white Missis-sippi Southern College, a segregationist group discussed framing him, historical documents showed. Kennard died of cancer in 1963 while on an “indefinite suspended sentence.” Students at suburban Chicago’s Stevenson High School had worked to clear his name as part of a history project.

Health-econ two-peat
In a rare repeat performance, Tomas Philipson, professor in the Harris School of Public Policy Studies, has won his second Kenneth J. Arrow Award for best paper in health economics. The award, which the International Health Economics Association presents annually, praised “The Quantity and Quality of Life and the Evolution of World Inequality,” coauthored with Gary Becker, AM’53, PhD’55, University professor in economics, sociology, and the Graduate School of Business, and Rodrigo Soares, AM’99, PhD’02, of the University of Maryland. The paper was published in the March 2005 American Economic Review.

Teaching awards
This year’s Quantrell awards for excellence in undergraduate teaching went to Helma Dik, associate professor in classics and the College; Heinrich Jaeger, professor in physics and the College; Jocelyn Malamy, associate professor in molecular genetics and cell biology; and Russell Tuttle, professor in anthropology and the College. Three graduate students, meanwhile, won the Wayne C. Booth prize for excellent teaching: Loren Goldman, AM’05, in political science; Zachary Gurard-Levin in bio-organic chemistry, and Sarah Wasserman, AM’05, in the humanities.